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Germany

...this light, it is not surprising that the period from the 1580s to the 1620s also witnessed a surge of persecutions for witchcraft in Germany (mainly in the southwest and Bavaria). As elsewhere, the witch craze in the empire seems to have been a reaction to the strains of a time of troubles, the actual causes of which, fairly clear now to historians, were hidden from contemporaries.

Salem witch trials

The events in Salem in 1692 were but one chapter in a long story of witch hunts that began in Europe between 1300 and 1330 and ended in the late 18th century (with the last known execution for witchcraft taking place in Switzerland in 1782). The Salem trials occurred late in the sequence, after the abatement of the European
witch-hunt fervour, which peaked from the 1580s and ’90s to the 1630s...

witchcraft

False ideas about witchcraft and the witch hunts persist today. First, the witch hunts did
not occur in the Middle Ages but in what historians call the “early modern” period (the late 14th to the early 18th century), the era of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. There was neither a witch-cult nor any cult, either organized or disorganized, of a...

Although accusations of witchcraft in contemporary cultures provide a means to express or resolve social tensions, these accusations had different consequences in premodern Western society where the mixture of irrational fear and a persecuting mentality led to the emergence of the witch hunts. In the 11th century attitudes toward witchcraft and sorcery began to change, a process that would...